Friday Feature: Aline-Mwezi Niyonsenga

Aline-Mwezi Niyonsenga is a third culture kid who’s allergic to place. She writes

about migrant experiences with the help of a tornado auntie, lion goddess, immortal

witch, the occasional ghost, etc. Her work has recently been published in Uncanny

Magazine, Augur Magazine, Andromeda Spaceways, GigaNotoSaurus, Fantasy

Magazine, and FIYAH Literary Magazine. It has also appeared in anthologies such

as As the Earth Dreams: Black Canadian Speculative Stories and Africa Risen. You

can find links to her works on her website: aline-mweziniyonsenga.com/

My Friend the Lord of the Forest

Like her missing cousin had advised, Gabi focused on one thing over studying: making friends. This was easy. As soon as she landed in the grey iciness of a foreign autumn, in a flat city of sharp rectangular lines, Gabi joined the community association and attended its youth conference event.

This was a good distraction from her cousin’s disappearance. She could pretend his messages from a month ago were sent just yesterday. Introduce yourself clearly. Enunciate. Ask people about themselves. They’ll immediately feel closer to you. People love to talk about themselves. Gabi had laughed at the advice. She had no trouble being social. Her cousin had pointed out that she had spent most of her life among family at home, among friends at school. She didn’t have enough practice with meeting new people—total strangers, her cousin had stressed. He had been the same before he studied abroad. He didn’t want her to make the same mistakes.

“Channel your inner Lord of the Forest,” her cousin had said. “Strong. Confident. Like you rule over trees.”

Gabi had laughed. Her cousin would always make silly references to his favourite made-up character: the Lord of the Forest, both beast and mighty king. Gabi didn’t understand her cousin’s admiration, but the silliness of the memory was a good distraction.

At the youth conference, Gabi ignored her freezing wet flats and laughed with other smartly blazered young people. “We haven’t seen you before. Where are you from?” was the common refrain. Questions of location, high school, university flew across the room. Common points were highly sought after. Once found, shoulders loosened.

Then a man leaned close to Gabi’s ear and said, “You’re Ingabire, right? I know your cousin, _____.” 

Ice rubbed down her neck. Her nametag said Gabi. Not once had she introduced herself in full. “Oh, really? My cousin?”

She hadn’t told this man where she was from. Her brain struggled to place him as the nerves in her chest squirmed with wary confusion. He wasn’t in the family group chat. Her cousin’s name was no longer mentioned there because who knew who was watching.

“Yes, I read his article,” the man said. He didn’t introduce himself. “I study information technology. Where do you study?”

“I’m job hunting,” Gabi said, and waved at someone behind him. She made three rounds around the velvety room, feet burning. In the bathroom she sobbed with her fist in her mouth. She grabbed her coat and left.

Outside, a warm wind surprised Gabi, followed by a fleeting shadow. A big dog running past, Gabi reasoned. A big, big dog. Strangest of all was the smell of wet soil that lingered.

#

After the conference encounter, Gabi spiraled. Normal guests would come to her aunt’s house, but their questions unnerved her. Who knew who was watching.

“I’m sorry about your cousin,” one friend of a friend said.

Gabi avoided further visits. She hibernated at school throughout the winter, morning to night, weekends at the library. She spoke to no one. Would they ask about her cousin? Would they watch her every move? Would they report back? Her cousin was still missing. Him and his obsession with the Lord of the Forest.

Gabi’s cousin was obsessed with one umugani he heard in primary school: the story of Sebwugugu. It was about a foolish husband and the poor wife who bore with his foolishness until he got himself killed. A ferocious beast killed him, so his wife kept house with an axe in her hand, ready to kill it should it come back. One day someone did knock at her door, introducing himself as the Lord of the Forest.

Go away, beast! the wife said. I know who you truly are.

Gabi didn’t remember how her cousin described it, but the Lord of the Forest was able to show that he was a noble individual who ruled justly over the forest and its creatures. I cannot ignore a woman alone. I simply wished to see you well.

He might have left her gifts or the help of ten enchanted ploughs to help her through her harvest, but eventually she trusted him as someone more dependable than her husband, and they married.

At this point, Gabi would snort, “That’s not even the right version of the story. A beast killed her husband, yes, but then the woman killed it, and the chief of a nearby village found out and rewarded her for getting rid of something that had killed his people. She married the chief.”

“I’m asking you to imagine,” her cousin would say. “Imagine if the chief and the beast were the same. Then the Lord of the Forest would be like a metaphor for protecting our trees.” Her cousin had studied environmental science. “Imagine if he was still around to protect forests today. There’d be less deforestation, less bandits and poachers hiding in there.”

Her cousin had written an article—a personal essay, he called it—about the Lord of the Forest and forest conservation, the dangers of overdevelopment, all in an effort to promote an equal exchange with nature, and pay it respect.

Five months had passed since Gabi’s cousin went missing. Four months since her arrival abroad. The snow thawed. Her aunt must have complained, because her mother was urging her to say hi to so-and-so, to meet with so-and-so’s daughter, to show her face at parties. To pretend everything was normal for who knows who is watching.

So when Gabi saw a poster for a student club, she decided to join.

#

Gabi joined Sanctuary Club on a sunny Monday afternoon.

A place where everyone is welcome. You can make friends, or you can enjoy silence together. Arts and crafts activities are provided. 

The sun was setting later and later every day, making Gabi wonder if one day it wouldn’t set at all. The colourful people of Sanctuary Club were even stranger, with their dyed hair and clinking bracelets, studying degrees her parents would never pay for her to study. Their club president was a taller-than-tall man named Murugo, who smelled like Vaseline and eucalyptus. For the first time in months, Gabi felt she was at home.

Murugo played an RnB playlist mixed with amapiano and old songs from home, while the club crocheted or glued magazine clippings to pieces of construction paper. Gabi did not know how to crochet, so she picked up a pair of scissors and an old student magazine. Murugo sat across from her. Up close, she could smell wet soil. It reminded her of the southern bamboo forest back home, where it was said Ngunda fell. She thought of swaying bamboo shoots. She cut a whole background of them off the magazine and glued it onto a blue piece of paper.

“Where are you from?” she asked Murugo.

“Gisenyi. I came here a long time ago, in the 90s.”

He didn’t look that much older than her. He must have been a baby. They skirted around the topic of genocide and spoke instead about school and what was missing on the playlist. Murugo was also studying environmental science. Maybe because Murugo grew up outside, Gabi felt safe to speak about her own two siblings, her extended family, but nothing about her missing cousin.

An old poet crowed over the Bluetooth stereo. Gabi snorted. “You’re like a grandpa.” But the steady drumming and keening words made her eyes water. Her cousin loved this song.

Murugo had no siblings. No parents. Gabi bit the inside of her cheek upon hearing it. At least her cousin was not dead. He couldn’t be.

Her first piece of art was a forest of smiling faces, the words rest and family big across the middle. The word rest reminded her of death, so she ripped that part off the artwork, crumpled the whole thing, and threw it away. No one questioned this.

#

Murugo hummed while he worked, a habit that reminded Gabi of her cousin, and for a moment she felt safe in the knowledge that somewhere somehow her cousin was humming. He was safe.

The club didn’t have an end time, but Gabi left before sunset. When she left the club room for the day, Murugo’s hum would carry into the hallway, following her all the way outside like a low buzzing in her eardrums. Her cousin was safe. He must be.

#

Once during club time, Murugo stretched his arms up and yawned. His shirt was cropped so Gabi saw the scar on his belly, like the bullet scar her grandfather had, and suddenly she could see the bullet holes under the kitchen window in her grandparents’ house.

Her cousin’s article mentioned how her grandparents had never found out who was shooting. Was it bandits? The old regime? One thing was for sure: they had come from the north. The article could have had to do with his disappearance. That’s what her family thought. He had been on his way to renew his passport and didn’t come back. The article had to be the reason, but sometimes there are no reasons. Sometimes family just disappears, and the people who took them never tell you why.

Tears welled up in Gabi’s eyes, dripping onto the words family, lost, and found. She left the clubroom. Murugo followed her.

“I’m just going to the bathroom,” she said.

“I know a good place to cry.”

He led her up a set of stairs, and more stairs, until they reached a door that pushed onto a roof alive with whirring sounds. Fans spun at the corners of a verdant paradise of potted ferns that formed a square around a swinging bench adorned with vines. The air was warm like home. The plants were outstretched arms like home. Gabi’s tears fell like so much rain back home.

Murugo pointed to the swinging bench and said he’d be right back. Gabi let herself sink into the bench’s plush cushions. She wrung her tears out, wailing just loud enough to blend with the chorus of fans and mechanical whirs surrounding the garden. It all became a hum of noise, steady like a lullaby.

Gabi woke to a tap on her shoulder. Murugo handed her a wad of tissues and she blew her nose. She hugged a cushion while he watered the plants with a plastic can. He scratched his belly, where the scar was.

“How did you get shot?” she asked.

Murugo looked out at the pinking sky. It was almost sunset already. “Bandits.”

Of course. “My cousin is missing.” Gabi bit the inside of her lip to steady it. “They want to hold a funeral for him.”

It hadn’t been a year yet, but did his family want to wait that long? One year would be agony for them, unspeakable for him. Better to believe he was dead. It was eight months since his disappearance.

Murugo wrapped an arm around her shoulder, and she leaned into him. As the sky blued, his arm warmed like fur.

#

“I remember the forest,” Murugo said. “It was vast back then. I’d climb the tallest tree and look out at everything. It smelled like damp leaves, like fresh oxygen, like soil. There were so many birds back then. And the mountain gorillas. They were many. I remember that white woman would be around them a lot. That was when the forest was smelling more and more like gunpowder, more like diesel. I heard more gunshots, people who didn’t belong running around. People fleeing.”

Gabi tuned in around the mention of gunshots. “You remember all that?” He didn’t look older than thirty. He must have been a child.

“I had to flee in the end.”

Their silence skirted around war again, and the snip-snip of scissors carried them through the afternoon. Gabi glued a forest scene again. It had a monkey (she couldn’t find gorillas), birds, and a man with darker skin than Murugo. The only word she cut out was home.

#

Murugo announced he was travelling for a few months. The new club president was a pale girl with longish teeth. Good-bye was a brief hug and a promise to exchange song recommendations. Gabi swallowed her loneliness and redoubled her focus on her studies.

One time she went up to the roof to cry, but the door was locked. Through the fogged-up window she saw grey shapes, like sleeping beasts in the gloom, and she remembered dozing on Murugo’s shoulder, how it had warmed like fur.

“I promise you. Your cousin will be found,” he’d said.

Gabi had chuckled. “You can’t promise that.”

“I simply wish to see you well.”

That day, Gabi left the clubroom after sunset. As she walked down the hall, noise exploded from the clubroom. Laughter morphed into barking. Shouts became howls. And there was a new smell, like wet soil, the same smell from the night at the youth conference, now coming from the room. Gabi walked away fast, following an instinct against trouble. The smell of wet soil lingered in her nostrils, following her all the way home. A shadow slipped under the streetlights. A big dog running past. A big, big dog.

#

Gabi ditched Sanctuary Club to form a study group with two people she met at a party her aunt dragged her to. They became fast friends. Their taste in music was fresh, not like Murugo’s grandpa's taste. She joked about this with her new friends. They teased her about how she might like him.

The funeral was postponed. Gabi exhaled then remembered it didn’t mean her cousin was any less missing. She forgot how to inhale and spent the next few weeks relearning how.

A second time she went up to the roof, but it was bare. The whirring came from generators, no fans, only a cold wind, reminding her of the day she first set foot on this strange country. It was supposed to be a new start, distance from her cousin’s disappearance, but the fact of his absence haunted her still. Her breath stuck in her throat and stayed there through winter.

She holed up in library study rooms, this time with people she could laugh with. Her throat loosened just a little. A year and a half since her cousin went missing. She learned to breathe around the absence clogging her throat.

A third time she went up to the roof to cry, but the door was locked. The window was too dirty to see through. It shone like the white haze of a winter storm. This time Gabi sank against the door. Was it even the right door? Had the verdant garden been a dream?

Her phone vibrated. She ignored it. Ten missed calls passed from her mother. Gabi rubbed her eyes dry and called back, both wishing for and dreading the moment her mother picked up.

“Gabi,” her mother sniffled.

She didn’t like that tone. Gabi reached for the locked door behind her. She yanked on its handle, as if it might help her escape.

“Is he dead?” Gabi asked.

The lock clicked, a clear sound in the trembling silence. Gabi tumbled onto the roof. The white haze broke into golden sunlight over the verdant garden, alive again with potted ferns arranged in a square around its creaking swing. Vines wrapped around the swing, and Gabi pulled on one of its leaves as she sat on the swing’s cushions. The smell of wet soil filled her nostrils.

“Your cousin is back,” her mother said. “Kasha is back.”

Gabi’s throat loosened into a squeak. “Alive?”

The sound of a hum grew deeper than the whirring fans. Gabi lowered her phone to listen, checking behind her. A fleeting shadow blinked past. A dog running. A big, big dog.

“Gabi?” Her mother’s voice faintly bleated through her fingers. “Are you there?”

Water poured from a plastic can, showering the ferns in the garden. Gabi did not have to see the face that did it. She knew who it truly was. “Murugo?”

The air was wet soil, the smell of home. Her cousin was home, but the Lord of the Forest was not.

###

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